


An Informal Analysis and Comparison of Magic-Related Thesis Defense Snake Fighting Methodology

by raspberryhunter



Category: FAQ: The "Snake Fight" Portion Of Your Thesis Defense (McSweeney's Post) - Luke Burns
Genre: Academia, Alternate Universe - Magic, Dysfunctional advisors, Gen, Happy Ending, Just Deserts, Misses Clause Challenge, POV First Person, Snakes, Yuletide Treat, thesis defense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:48:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28152636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raspberryhunter/pseuds/raspberryhunter
Summary: I wasn't worried about Allie's thesis defense. She had her sword and a powerful magical charm, and her thesis advisor liked her. But I only had two of those three things going for me.
Comments: 35
Kudos: 71
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	An Informal Analysis and Comparison of Magic-Related Thesis Defense Snake Fighting Methodology

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kouredios](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kouredios/gifts).



> Thank you to my betas, sprocket and iberiandoctor!

My roommate and best friend, Allie Lee, was having her thesis defense today. Of course I went to it. There was actually a bit of a crowd, though that wasn't so surprising. It was mostly other grad students -- partially because there might be free food at some point afterwards (every so often there was food, if only as snakebait), and partially because we were all looking for hints and tips for when we had to go through our thesis defense. And partially, I knew, to rubberneck, especially if the snake portion didn't end well.

I wasn't worried about Allie. Not too much, anyway. Her advisor, Professor Penniwick, was a nice person _and_ actually liked her. Allie had told me many times that her dissertation was nothing special -- a lot of that was impostor syndrome, Allie had problems with that, but it's also true that neither of us was a supergenius -- but I knew that Penniwick wouldn't tell the snake handler that she deserved a large snake for the snake-fight portion of her defense.

(Professor Reston, my advisor, was another story. But my thesis defense wasn't for at least another six months, so I didn't have to worry about that. Yet.)

Allie, standing in the combat circle within the conference room with her ceremonial thesis-defense sword buckled to her side, went through the Powerpoint slides where she discussed the theoretical effects of various spellchants on transdimensional portals to dystopian hellscapes. Penniwick was on her committee, of course, and so was my advisor Reston, and two other professors from the department. She stumbled a couple of times, but was able to recover. Penniwick nodded at various points Allie made, and another professor asked a couple of questions which Allie answered easily. And at least she didn't have to deal with her snake roaming the room while she was presenting; apparently some universities still did that, but at ours the snake handler generally didn't let it out until the questioning period.

Reston drawled, "What about experimental justification for all these --" he waved a hand at the Powerpoint slide -- "theoretical constructs?"

It was a reasonable question; it was only the tones of contempt in his voice that were unreasonable.

Allie blinked at him for a moment, clearly taken aback by the disdain in his voice even though it should have been a easy question to answer. Finally she said, stammering a bit, "There is justification from the field of organic portals, with known transport of vertebrates to hellscape dimensions through the portals demonstrated to exist in the maws of giant squid affected by Deep Magic." _Go Allie!_ I cheered internally. "And as you know, Bea Quijano --" she didn't look at me -- "has run simulations of how a similar situation might behave in a mechanical portal in a larger configuration."

Reston frowned but said nothing more.

(You'd think a professor would like it when someone could answer a question. Reston thought it was an excuse to beat you down. Ask me how I know.)

Then we all saw the snake as it made its way through the door of the conference room. It was bright yellow, with a pattern of black atop the yellow, and several meters in length. Ordinarily I might have found it almost beautiful. But I knew that it was a fast-moving, venomous taipan, and much larger than either Allie or I had expected. 

Allie was afraid of snakes, especially large ones, and she'd been hoping hard for a small garden snake. Penniwick's last student, Dan, had actually gotten a cute baby corn snake that he'd convinced the snake-handler to let him keep as a pet after wrestling it to the ground and throwing it out the window. But even assuming a venomous snake -- Allie wasn't super organized about her references, to be honest, so she'd definitely known it was a possibility -- we'd expected something more like an adder, not so aggressive, maybe a foot or two in length. Not this one.

Penniwick actually stood up from his chair, a troubled look on his face, and said something softly to the other professors on the committee. It looked like he hadn't expected this either.

Reston shook his head and crossed his arms. Penniwick looked like he was going to protest further, but Reston said something quietly to him, and he sat back down instead.

The taipan slithered into the circle. As we'd rehearsed so many times in the apartment, Allie drew her sword from its scabbard. The snake raised its head and looked at her. Allie looked petrified.

The snake swayed closer. Allie had the sword in her hand, but she didn't move. I realized she had frozen with fear. There was no way she would be able to do the complicated sword manuevers we had practiced in case of this eventuality. "Allie," I said, loudly enough for her to hear, "don't forget the charm!"

Her eyes widened, and she nodded, touching the golden amulet that lay on her chest. The amulet was not a reliable routine spellchant but an unpredictable Deep Magic charm an old grad student in Penniwick's group had given her when we were first-years, one of those ancient items that is passed through generations of grad students. Being Deep Magic, the charm could not be measured precisely like a spellchant; it worked, so we had been told, not on specified inputs but on unquantifiable features like one's emotions and state of mind, thus often having uncertain results. So it was something of a last resort, but I could see that Allie needed a last resort.

 _Vanquish mine enemy_ , Allie said to the snake, raising the charm into the air. If all went as expected with the amulet, the taipan was supposed to then slither gently to the window and drop out. Although it was more traditional for the candidate to use her sword or even wrestle the snake, the snake leaving the room in any way, even by Deep Magic, _was_ one of the accepted ways for it to be defeated, for the candidate to win the thesis defense snake fight and get her doctorate.

The snake did not do this. Instead it raised its head and hissed at Allie. "Oh shit," I said involuntarily. Somehow the charm had misfired; it seemed to have made the snake more aggressive instead of less.

I snuck a glance at Penniwick to see his reaction, and I gave a start as I realized he was chanting something under his breath. I couldn't tell what it was, but as I watched, the snake didn't seem quite as big as it had been. In fact, I must have been quite mistaken about it being several meters long; it was more like a meter long. No, more like ten centimeters.

Allie visibly relaxed. The snake still hissed at her, but she took her sword, carefully scooped up the tiny snake so that it was wriggling on the tip of the sword, and threw it out the window. 

Penniwick said, so that all of us could hear: "The candidate has fulfilled the conditions of her Ph.D. thesis defense. Congratulations, Doctor Lee!" One of the grad students began to cheer, and then we were all cheering and clapping.

Reston, brows drawn, whispered something to Penniwick. I imagined that it was something like _why would you do something like that?_ Penniwick shrugged and leaned back in his chair, looking rather smug.

But Allie didn't have to worry about any of that now. All of us grad students made our way to the bar that served as our primary hangout; the tradition being that Allie, as the successful candidate, was to buy drinks for all of us. "Gosh," said my labmate Prisha, "I couldn't believe how big that snake was!"

"I thought I was toast," Allie said frankly. "I was thinking about how I had been doing so badly at the defense, and here I was freezing up like I always did -- Penniwick would be so ashamed of me -- and then the charm failed --"

"All's well that ends well, Doctor Allie," I said cheerily, and we celebrated and drank and had a lively evening.

Then I cried myself to sleep that night, because I knew that my defense would not go that way.

*

Professor Reston, you see, was... well, people called him a _difficult_ advisor. He worked on experimental design of artificial-mechanical transdimensional portals; even though no one had ever yet sent anything bigger than a grain of sand through an artificial-mechanical portal to a dystopian hellscape, it was a very hot field. And Reston, as the professor whose lab had actually sent the grain of sand through, was the hottest professor in the field. If you impressed him you were all but guaranteed a job in academia, and I wasn't the only student who thought it was a good idea to do my thesis with him. The catch was, of course, that no one ever impressed him. Case in point: the day after Allie's defense, he yelled at me for not being in lab during her defense _and_ for not coming back after it (which would have been Friday at 5pm, mind you -- and yes, this means all of this was taking place on a Saturday morning), calling me stupid and idiotic and why had he ever taken me on, and _that_ was before he started in on me for not finishing the experiment simulations he'd ordered me to do, even though they would take a week to run _and_ were mathematically impossible!

(He did make me code up and run the test simulations anyway, which took forever. And then he yelled at me when, in fact, they didn't work, as if it were my own fault for being so stupid that I couldn't figure out how to contradict an airtight mathematical proof. I guess it was better than the time I had the breakthrough about how to fix up a spellchant to hold an artificial-mechanical portal open more than a microsecond, even though Reston had told me it couldn't be done, and Reston published it as his own idea without even putting me on as author.)

(...Yes, I could tell Reston stories all day.)

I thought I'd defend around the same time as Allie. Then I'd thought it would be six months after her. No, it was a year before I finished all the busywork and corrections Reston made me do (and, of course, when I submitted drafts for his approval he was always too busy to look at them for weeks on end). I wasn't looking forward to what he expected me to do with the thesis after the defense; probably more corrections piled on top of more corrections. Would I ever graduate? I often thought drearily.

Allie had taken a postdoc with Penniwick, so at least we still got to be roommates. I hadn't relished the thought of finding a first-year to room with, now that all of the other grad students from our year had pretty much all graduated.

Finally even Reston couldn't think of any reasons why I couldn't defend, and I was in my department's conference room, myself inside the combat circle instead of watching from the outside. Finally I was giving my presentation on simulations of artificial-mechanical portal experiments to my committee, Reston and Penniwick and two other professors from our department, Allen and Scordel, my sword sheathed at my side, the golden amulet on a chain around my neck.

 _You can do it!_ Allie mouthed from where she stood with a crowd of other grad students. And I thought I was doing well, even against Reston's malicious questions. ("Based on your simulation work, how would you characterize the strata of dystopian hellscape available to a mechanical portal?" I didn't do any simulations on that, asshole, it's really hard to do simulations of unknown dystopias! And of course when I said that -- more politely, of course -- he wanted to know why I was so dumb that I hadn't even tried.)

But that was before my snake came into the circle.

I'd thought Allie's snake was huge. I hadn't known the half of it. It was a python, not venomous -- I'd made sure to check and double-check and triple-check my bibliography so as not to get a venomous snake -- but an extremely large one, easily ten meters long, the biggest snake I'd ever seen, so large it looked like it could swallow me whole, and with a golden sheen to its green scales that I'd also never seen before, not in all my googling of snakes and trips to the local zoo.

I heard a collective gasp from the grad students behind me. This did not make me feel any better.

I saw out of the corner of my eye Penniwick lean over to Reston; he said, loudly enough for all of us grad students to hear, "There's something wrong here, Chris. First Allie, and now Bea --"

Reston said, also pitched so that we all could hear, "Jim, it's a thesis defense. This is all within acceptable parameters for the snake fight. No _interfering_ like you did in the last one, either."

"This isn't right," Penniwick insisted.

"No, Jim. This is _my_ student. Even you can't go against that."

Penniwick said nothing more. I didn't blame him -- Reston was right, he really couldn't interfere with a student without the assent of the advisor. I'd seen it happen once, and let's just say the department made use of literal lightning bolts. Yeah.

But I was terrified. I'd only even heard of a snake this big once -- school legend said there'd been a grad student, not even in this department, who had elected to only fight a snake rather than write a thesis. The story spoke of a snake this big, but hadn't said what the student had done to defeat it.

 _Okay, think_. After the charm had failed Allie, I'd worked on my sword technique, but that had been assuming a snake that couldn't just swallow me while I tried to hack at it. That wasn't going to work. I'd of course looked up the spellchant I thought Penniwick had used, and I recited it, but nothing happened.

I glanced at Reston; he had an incredibly smug look on his face. He held out his hands, palms up, in a gesture I'd seen many times: _spellchants aren't going to work on this one._ He'd said it about some of Prisha's constructions (all right, true), about my simulations (whether or not it was actually true), about my thesis (definitely not true; of course you can't do any major arcana on your text, but cantrips for simple grammar checks, yes), and now he was saying it about the snake. There was a surety in his face -- and then I realized that the subtle sheen I saw on the python's scales was an anti-spellchant coating.

All the other members of the committee seemed to be coming to a similar conclusion; all three of them were eyeing Reston warily. But no one did anything.

The snake hissed at me. My hand closed on the amulet.

I didn't want to use the charm. I _really_ didn't want that snake becoming more aggressive towards me like Allie's had, especially knowing that Reston was cheering it on rather than trying to save me. But I didn't have anything left to do. And I thought that Deep Magic shouldn't be affected by the snake's anti-spellchant barriers, which targeted the very predictability of the spellchants. The amulet would probably still work. And maybe my thoughts or emotions or whatever crap the Deep Magic used were right for it to work the way it was supposed to, this time. Maybe.

I could not believe Reston had done this to me. I'd written a thesis -- maybe it wasn't the most brilliant thesis in the world, but it was solid work, and he'd given me a snake that was as large and as threatening as if I hadn't written anything at all. He was supposed to be my mentor, my advisor! No, on second thought, I very much believed he'd done this. He'd showed me he was capable of this every single time I'd interacted with him.

The snake slithered forward, its giant mouth opening. Yeah, I was even more sure that mouth was big enough to swallow me, and it was moving fast enough I didn't think I'd be able to outrun it. So what the hell. _Vanquish mine enemy_ , I said, raising the amulet into the air.

Later, after all of this was over, I realized that the charm must draw from one's subconscious thoughts about one's enemy. Generally, a grad student using it would think of the snake as her enemy. But at the time Allie said the charm, she was self-berating herself for being her own worst enemy. And I --

The python looked me in the eye. I looked back at it.

And then it hurled itself to the other side of the room, where the defense committee was. And what do you know, I'd been right about how large it was, because it opened its jaws and in the blink of an eye swallowed Reston whole, before he even had a chance to scream.

There was a silence while everyone was too shocked to do or say anything, during which the snake looked at me again and then slithered out the door, to go who knows where, maybe back to the snake handler, maybe to freedom. I never saw it again.

(I never heard from Reston again either. Penniwick signed all my defense paperwork, asking for no thesis corrections at all. I didn't see Reston publish in the field again, but I also didn't ever check any more closely than that. I'll just note here that Penniwick, who hadn't before been active in the field of organic portals, published an article not too long afterwards on the theory of transdimensional dystopian-hellscape human transport via organic portals mediated by thesis-defense snakes. But I never asked him whether his paper had had any experimental justification.)

The three other professors on the committee looked shaken. After a moment Penniwick said, "Well -- the candidate has fulfilled the conditions of her Ph.D. thesis defense. Congratulations, Doctor Quijano!"

There was some respectful clapping. As I made my way out of the room, I saw a group of younger grad students looking at me. I heard one of them say, "Wow. I want to be just like her!"

I took a deep breath and smiled, knowing I was free.

**Author's Note:**

> ...if anyone who knew me in grad school ever reads this, I'd like to reiterate that the evil advisor in the story bears absolutely _zero_ resemblance to my own advisor :) (Though anyone who knew me in grad school probably knows that.) Nor is Reston based on any other professor I knew in grad school -- though of course one hears stories...


End file.
